1. Signal & Noise

    Yesterday I took a look at the interesting research - Notifications and Awareness: A Field Study of Alert Usage and Preferences. The aim was to discover the influence of the desktop (Email) notifications on the productivity. As I undestood the conclusion is that users are able to determine if an notification is urgent and needs an immediate response. So if user is working on an ongoing task which requires full concentration, in most cases he\she will decide to put notification aside and will continue his\her work. …


  2. Agile Charts. Are we on time? Are we on budget?

    I’ve just read about Time and Budget Charts proposed by John Rusk on June 30, 2005. Here is the idea:

    <p>As you can see it gives answers to the following very important questions:</p>  <ul>   <li>Are we on time?</li>    <li>Are we on budget?</li> </ul>
    


  3. Kanban – definitely worth considering!

    I just finished reading a Kanban vs Scrum practical guide. And you know, I’m really excited with Kanban. It’s main aim is to visualize the working process. Also I can see the following principal advantages of Kanban (versus Scrum):

    • Specialist teams allowed.
    • Can add new items whenever capacity is available
    • Estimation optional.
    • Iterations optional. Can have separate cadences for planning, release, and process improvement. Can be event-driven instead of iterative.


  4. Test Doubles classification

    If you don’t know the difference between a Mock Object and a Test Stub, probably it’s good idea to checkout Test Double article at the http://xunitpatterns.com.  


  5. New Url

    Today at a long last I found some time to move my blog to the  new domain - ayvazyan.net. From now I hope to allocate a little more time to blog so stay tuned Подмигивающая рожица


  6. Planning Poker

    Planning poker is an interesting approach to make estimations. If you interested in it but didn’t have a chance to try it yourself, the following link will be extremely usefull http://planningpoker.com/. It’s free and straightforward online tool to make estimations using Planning Poker approach. So now you don’t need to search physical cards to test Planning Poker approach. All that you need is just one moderator registered at planningpoker.com. Other developers could just specify their names. …


  7. BDD .Should() assertion syntax to NUnit

    If you didn’t have a chance to review NUnit.Should library you definitely need to do that right now! (it’s available as NuGet Library Package as well) NUnit.Should adds fancy BDD style syntax to NUnit. For example you could use 5.Should(Be.EqualTo(5)) instead of Assert.That(5, Is.EqualTo(5)). …


  8. TeamCity 6.5: Free for unlimited number of users!

    Today I found that JetBrains released new version of the TeamCity. And that the most exciting - now it’s free for unlimited number of users! So don’t hesitate to read What's New and Download this awesome tool! …


  9. NEWSEQUENTIALID or GUID as a Primary Key

    If you still don’t use GUIDs as a Primary Key for you tables, or if you do and use NEWID function, I have something to tell you. Since MS SQL Server 2005 we could use NEWSEQUENTIALID function to create unique GUIDs. It “creates a GUID that is greater than any GUID previously generated by this function on a specified computer since Windows was started” And it has the following advantages:

    1. It's faster than NEWID.
    2. It's optimize work with index pages.
    I want to notice that GUIDs will be still unique accross multiple computers if the source computer has a network card. So please don’t doubt it, GUIDs is a great option to be used as Primary Key. I created a tiny script to play with NEWSEQUENTIALID. …


  10. Ruby... isn't it great?

    Yesterday I finished introduction course of the Ruby language at http://tryruby.org/. And you know it’s great! I really liked Ruby, but in addition I loved the tryruby.org itself. It’s just great! So if you “Got 15 minutes? Give Ruby a shot right now!” Today I done Rails For Zombies tutorials. Ruby on Rails is really amazing. Tutorials are also very good, but you know that zombie stuff… …